No More Revengeance
by TaleForge
Summary: A No More Heroes/Revengeance crossover fic. One of those things that's so stupid, that it kind of had to happen.
1. Chapter 1

**Chapter One**

 _Jerry Preacher... *guitar sting*_

Mr. Valdez was a hard bastard. His father was a hard bastard, his grandfather was a hard bastard, his six brothers were hard bastards, and they all made each other hard bastards by beating the crap out of each other. He dropped out of school, because it was _not_ filled with hard bastards, and with his lack of education he gravitated to where all hard bastards gravitated to: all the places where other hard bastards hung out at. There, he learned everything he needed to know. He learned who to punch, who not to punch, and who could give him a job standing in front of a door threatening people with punches if they didn't stop looking like they were hard bastards. But the one thing they never taught him was how to respond when the dumbest thing he'd ever seen in his short, angry life came walking up to the door he was guarding.

Mr. Valdez could only guess that the man was trying to pose as a tourist. That's what he would have assumed, going by the loud blue Hawaiian shirt, the board shorts, the "I'm someone's dumpy, unfuckable uncle on vacation" shades and the inexplicable smattering of zinc painting his nose white. He could only assume that, because the man stomping up to the door was otherwise a cyborg. Like, there wasn't any pussy footing around it, the man was a fucking cyborg. He was chromed up head to toe, covered in silvery artificial skin that was less about looking human and more to give the collection of muscle fibers that formed his body some kind of cohesive structure. The man had a chin like a villain out of a shitty secret agent movie or, like, the bastard lovechild of a bulldog and a backhoe. _For fuck's sake,_ Mr. Valdez thought to himself, beneath his impassable hard bastard expression, _this guy's packing claws on the end of his fingers! Who the fuck's he think he's fooling?_

Still, Mr. Valdez was in a mood, and was half looking for an excuse to add "once punched out a cyborg" to his violence resume, so he decided to let the oddity come up and do its bit. The cyborg, clearly unfazed by Mr. Valdez's folded arms and "don't fuck with me" stance, gave him a wave and a smile that would have said "I am the exact opposite of a hard bastard" if it had been delivered by any other chin. "Why, hello there," the cyborg said, with what had to be the worst attempt at a Midwest accent that anybody would ever have to endure. "I was hopin' yoo could direct me to that there bathroom. I've been on a bus for the last coupla hours with nothin' but a bottle-a Moose Jaw Juice, and lemme tell ya, she makes for some needy company, if ya know what I mean."

"No bathroom here." Mr. Valdez responded, with the stony glare that all the hard bastards taught him. "Unless you wanna piss on a wall."

The cyborg seemed genuinely taken aback at being so thoroughly shut down, but he recovered quickly enough, back to goofy grins and bad accents. "Say, uh, I don't suppose you could tell me what yer guardin' over here, could ya?" He waved a hand at the building behind Mr. Valdez, nearly scraping a claw against his nose in the process. "Looks like a pretty happenin' party spot, don'tcha know."

"Private club," Mr. Valdez gruffed. "Members only."

The cyborg made an exaggerated "oh, pshaw" motion. "Members only? Now that sounds like a challenge if ever there was one. Lemme talk to your boss; I'm sure he'll let me in faster'n milk freezes on a Wisconsin winter night."

"Not gonna happen."

"Aw, now don't be like that..."

"Not." Mr Valdez puffed out his chest. "Gonna." He popped a kink out of his neck. "Happen."

"Well, why not?" the cyborg huffed, dropping his accent as he put on what could only be described as a childish cyborg pout.

Mr. Valdez reached into his pocket, slipped the brass knuckles around his fingers, and flexed them tight into a fist. "Because, sir, you are obviously a cyborg coming to kill the fiftieth top ranked assassin, and I'm under orders to make sure anybody who tries to pull that shit leaves with half their face missing."

The cyborg put one hand up in surrender (it was at this point Mr. Valdez's "hard bastard" training made him notice that the cyborg's other hand had been down at his side the whole time, for some reason). "Woah, now, there buddy," he said, suddenly back to his affected voice. "You're barking up the wrong tree, there, now, don't you know... um, there... you... y'all... umm..." There was a silence that hung in the air, thick and awkward as the closet six and a half minutes into a childhood game of seven minutes in heaven, which the cyborg eventually broke with two words:

"Thunder Strike."

Before Mr. Valdez could remove his knuckled fist from his pocket, a palm was practically touching his nose. The rest was kind of a chaotic blur. He remembered a concussive force, like a bomb had gone off in front of his face. He remembered his head smacking against the door. He remembered a bizarrely heeled foot in his solar plexus, being propelled by what looked like rockets as it pushed him _through_ the door and into the club, where he finally came to rest against the bar. And he remembered the cyborg, hanging in mid air, suspended by his foot which was currently digging into Mr. Valdez's body. He thought he heard the cyborg say something before the pain finally overtook him, some bullshit like "I have to give you credit. Not everyone could see through my disguises. Only a professional could sniff out a master of infiltration like myself." Of course, then he stopped remembering things, because the bar gave out and he was blasted headlong into the wall, where he died.

The cyborg kicked off of Mr. Valdez's body just as the bar collapsed, pulling a backflip and landing with the sort of bullshit three point cat like grace that marks someone way too inclined to showing off. The collection of hard bastards that had been drinking and chatting in the room were not terribly impressed, or at least not impressed enough to forget to pick up their pipes, bats, and knives and surround the intruder.

"Guess there's no point in maintaining the act any longer," the cyborg said, his voice gaining the faintest hint of a "hard bastard" gravel. He removed his right hand from its place at his side, holding it up to the growing mob with his palm down and his fingers seemingly curled aorund something. At that point, the cloaking device disengaged, revealing the long, silver briefcase he'd been holding, which popped open from the bottom and dispensed an overly elaborate looking red bladed katana. With a kick to keep it up in the air, he grabbed it in his other hand, tossed the briefcase to land on Mr. Valdez's mangled corpse, and took an appropriately menacing looking stance. "It's game time!"


	2. Chapter 2

**Chapter Two**

 _Rules of Nature_

Being a thug was a generally easy life. Unlike the military, they didn't ask you to go to PT or weapons training or generally expect you to focus any attention to getting "good" at fighting. They also didn't kick you out for being a violent jackass with as much respect for authority as high school diplomas. Of course, that tended to bite one in the ass when somebody came along who actually knew what they were doing, but it wasn't until about now that they really had cause to think about that.

Jimmy was the first to try his luck, him and his favorite lead pipe. He always said he'd trust Little Pipey Longstockings more than a sword or a gimmicky beam katana any day of the week; given what the others heard from him at practically every opportunity, his strategy for dealing with Touchdown was self-aggrandizing and borderline fetishistic in its overtones. It's too bad in practice his great pipe strategy seemed to be forgotten in the rush for violence, and he settled instead for some gangling overhead jumping chop. A child could have seen that coming; the cyborg slapping it aside with his sword, kicking Jimmy up in the air, spinning like a top and turning his blade into a Cuisinart and Jimmy's body into the fruit post-smoothie was just showboating on top of all of that.

Darnell didn't see that until it was just a mite too late to reconsider his strategy of trying to rush the cyborg with a switchblade. He could have sworn that it wouldn't have mattered anyway, since he caught the guy on the end of his little combat twirl and had the knife aimed right for the guy's robo-kidneys. Unfortunately for Darnell, the split-second that the cyborg regained his footing, he kicked off the floor and was about a foot and a half too far to the left for anything other than a light graze. Doubly unfortunate was the fact that what took the cyborg's place in front of the thug was that sword of his. Darnell would never know what went wrong.

Bill, Jed, and "Minuteman" McGinty tried to improve their odds by surrounding the cyborg and attacking more or less in unison. They swung at him with pipes and bats (McGinty liked to take one of each because he thought going akimbo was "cool"), but they quickly learned that the kind of person who goes into battle with a blood red katana might know how to use it. The cyborg sketched a pattern in the air of strikes against their various weapons, knocking them aside one by one and taking bits of them off in the process. The three could only follow the sword blade, hoping to see the counterattack coming. What they didn't notice was that the hilt of that sword left the cyborg's hand, hung in the air for a second, and then found a home inexplicably nestled in the arch between the ball of his right foot and his impractically tall heel. Jed got it first, when the cyborg lashed out with his foot-mounted sword. Bill got it next when the cyborg retracted his leg, pivoted and extended in a thrust. McGinty tried to get his two weapons up in defense (a perfectly "cool" defense, one might add) as the cyborg lifted his leg up to axe-kick down, but the pipe, the bat and even McGinty proved to be less than stellar at holding together as the blade came crashing down.

This just left Nils, the fat one, hanging in the back and only just now managing to get to his feet. He saw his friends being reduced to various proportions of quivering cold cuts, and the cyborg vacationer in the middle of it all, saw the blood stuck to his "I'm somebody's dumpy, unfuckable uncle" shades, and knew immediately what had to be done.

"Yo, screw this!" Nils shouted, as he made a beeline for the door. "Touchdown ain't worth this shit; I'm out!"

The cyborg watched Nils leave, as he tossed the sword back into his hand, wiped the blood off between the bicep and forearm of his other arm, and turned around to reach into the suitcase that had slipped off Mr. Valdez's still twitching corpse. As he fished around for the scabbard, he heard a familiar sound rattling the small bones of his ear. _Chirrup, chirrup!_ Distractedly, he touched a finger to his earlobe. "Bladewolf," he said, "what's your location?"

A blue holographic display sprung to life in the air just to the cyborg's right, on which a robotic dog sat staring, his bizarre tentacle-tail swishing back and forth in the background. "Raiden," it said, the red panel where its eyes should be glowing with every syllable, "I am currently ten kilometers from the city limits."

"Should've let me pick you up," Raiden replied, as he started to attach the scabbard to his back. "We would have gotten in together."

"Negative. This is more efficient." Bladewolf snapped to attention for a second, as though something on his end caught his eye, before looking back to the screen. "Based on your current state, I can only surmise you went to the target without me."

"Yeah. So far, I'm not seeing a lot of our tech around. These guys aren't fitted with CNT muscle fiber."

"SOP?"

"Possibly. I mean, _something's_ up with these guys, charging a cyborg head on. They're probably on fear suppressing nanomachines."

"That would be a logical possibility." Bladewolf started to move as he spoke, though the feed remained fixed on him. "Other possibilities include mental derangement, suicidal tendencies, or ignorance about the abilities that cyborgs possess."

Raiden grunted in understanding, as he scanned around for where to go next. "Guess there's no point in theorizing now. I'll have to look into this more once I find Preacher."

"Proceed with caution," Bladewolf warned. "Unaugmented humans are of a negligible risk level, but their leader is believed to have been given cybernetic enhancement."

"Don't worry, I'll be careful. Say, while I have you, I wanna ask you something. Does the word 'Touchdown' mean anything to you, in relation to this UAA business?"

"I only know of that word in regards to the landing of aircraft, or to the primary method of scoring in American football."

"Right. Just checking. Get over here as soon as you can, so we can figure this out."

"Understood." Bladewolf's walk changed to a loping run and, being a robot, this in no way impacted the way his eye panel flashed. "I am currently coming up on a location the locals call an 'Akashic Point.' It seems to be significant as a tourist destination."

Raiden found what he was looking for, a stairway up to the head office. "Well, don't get too wrapped up in sight-seeing. See you when you get here."

 _Pree-ooh..._ The feed shut down, and Raiden removed his finger from his ear just as he came up on the door. It seemed to be locked. Not just locked, in fact; where there would normally be a doorknob, there seemed to be a place where one might put something like an odd engraving of some kind. Raiden carefully thought this new development over, before just bringing his sword up and hacking the door to pieces.


	3. Chapter 3

**Chapter Three**

 _N.M.H._

Happily, Nils learned he didn't have to go far to find another group of UAA thugs. He only had to follow a passing nondescript sedan to a nearby warehouse and Bob's your uncle, there they were. Out of breath, he explained the situation, and in short order he and about ten or so besuited professionals were back to the bar at a brisk jog, guns and pipes drawn. "Holy shit..." one of the smaller guys, Gomez, whistled while he looked over the remains of the front door. "Yo, Nils. Touchdown do this shit?"

"Nah, man," Nils wheezed. "It was some other guy. Cyborg. White hair. Hawaiian shirt."

"Well, shit," Jake said, with the sort of chuckle that came with completely failing to grasp the situation. "Now I've heard everything."

Nils stooped over for a second to catch his breath, unaware of the sound of sneakers scuffing along behind him.

Petey the Perch did what Petey the Perch always does in these kinds of situations; he tried to take charge. "All right, guys. We do this clean and quick. Rush the place, find this guy, and hit 'em 'til he stops twtiching. Gomez, Rick, get those safeties off."

Gomez laughed, pointing his gun at everybody's face with lazy swings of the arm. "Like I ever had it on?"

Nils's pulse finally started to cease it's pounding in his ears, which meant he could finally hear that weird, insistent electric buzzing that was slowly getting louder. _That sound,_ he thought to himself, _where have I heard that noise before?_

Petey, meanwhile, continued rattling off useless orders. "Jake and I'll hit the guy. Nils? You try and get around him. We'll try and keep a shot clear for Rick and Gomez, and..." And then, suddenly, the group heard something from Petey they never really had a chance to hear. They heard him stop, bemused.

"What's up?" Nils asked, thinking that Petey was staring at him with that look of "Oh, shit..." When he was able to put it together that that wasn't the case, he finally realized that the buzzing noise and the footsteps were right behind him. He turned around.

Nils recognized a lot of things on the man who stared up at him. He recognized the shitty red jacket. He recognized the gelled up, spiky black hair. He recognized the throwback eighties shades, the torn up jeans, the black shirt with the words "Bad Girl" stenciled on like it meant something. The man stared, seemingly beyond Nils, with the sort of look Nils had only seen on angry assassins leaning on people for the money they were owed.

"Hey, guys," he said, with clearly manufactured casualness. "There a party going on, over here?"

Nils began to shout "It's fucking Touchdown!" Unfortunately for him, he only managed to get about four and a half syllables in before a blue light cut from left to right in front of him, taking with it the top part of his head. The man apparently known as Touchdown rested the filament of his glowing blue beam katana against his shoulder, taking in his view of the rest of the UAA thugs as Nils' heavy body sank to the concrete in a heap.

Gomez had bullets out in the air before he even really bothered trying to aim the damn gun. Touchdown managed to get his sword up in time, feeling the impact as the bullets mostly evaporated on contact with super heated photon energy (or plasma, or unobtanium or whatever the fuck made his katana so hot) and deflected off the rest. Jake jumped in with his laser brass knuckles, swinging hard for those faux-retro shades. Touchdown caught the attack with his sword and, through a sheer display of force, pushed the attack back, throwing Rick off balance. A swipe from right to left greeted him as he caught his footing, so deep that it caught under both his and Rick's necks, taking their heads.

And then Touchdown was on the move. Petey could hardly get his cheap, mall brand katana up before Touchdown was tearing into him with a left swipe, a diagonal right swipe, and then the sort of vaulting overhead chop that, unlike certain pipe wielding assassins, this guy had the raw physicality to pull off with enough strength to leave Petey clean in halves.

And with that, Gomez was left. Touchdown pulled himself up from his carnage, took one look at the door, and then to the now terrified assassin. "One of you guys did this?"

"N-n-no, sir, Mr. Crownless King, sir," Gomez warbled, holding his gun up with zero regard for where his finger was on the trigger. "Nils said it was some cyborg."

"Cyborg?"

"Yeah. Said he busted in and started cutting up the place."

Touchdown pursed his lips, stared off to the side, rocked back on his feet in barely contained frustration, and then with a mighty "Fuck!" cut Gomez from navel to neck, walking past the spray of blood to storm into the bar. "Fuck," he repeated, and then many times in sequence as he stepped over bodies, one for every stomping, petulant step onto the blood-soaked carpets. "Fuck, fuck, fuck, fuck, fuck, fuck... fucking fuck!"

He saw a door, cut to splinters, and immediately began to barrel through it. "Preacher! Preacher, you'd better not be dead. Do you hear me?"

Nick and Dick, meanwhile, stood guard by the old dance floor further into the club. In a manner of speaking, they were standing guard. The fact is, they were both just a little bit tipsy on designer drinks and weren't really all that suited to the whole guard thing, the way they kept their backs to the only entrance to the room and spent most of their time shooting the shit.

"Hey, Dick," said Nick.

"Yeah, Nick," said Dick.

"Did you hear something?"

"What? Like what?"

"I dunno, like the sound of all our friends being brutally murdered in the next room."

"Man, you're hearing things." Dick went behind the bar and started futzing around with bottles of expensive liquor. "The only guy we're expecting to come in is Touchdown, and we'd have heard him coming a county away."

"Yeah, but... shouldn't we, you know, go see if everyone's all right?"

It was around this time that a red katana lanced through Nick from above, attached to the foot of the cyborg. Dick didn't hear, as he pulled up some French sounding vodka, which seemed to him to be a hilarious contradiction of terms and the definition of irony, insofar as he understood what irony was. "You know, you worry too much." As he poured himself a glass, he didn't hear the horrible sounds of Nick being lifted into the air and mercilessly being torn apart by the lightning fast slashes of a killer ninja cyborg. He didn't even notice the splashback when body parts started littering the bar behind him. "What, you think we're under attack by ninjas, or something? Lemme tell you something. I've been doing this thug thing for six months, now. I've seen everything there is to see." He took a pull of the vodka, finding it ironically delicious, so much so, he failed to notice the cyborg clambering over the bar towards him with murder in his cybernetic eyes. "And there ain't nothing that I can't handle, okay?" He laughed, a very ironic laugh.

And that was when he noticed the katana sticking out of his chest. As it pulled out of him, and he dropped to his knees, mere moments before he was hacked uncerimoniously to ribbons, he remembered thinking to himself _you know, there's a word that describes this very situation I'm in, but for the life of me, I can't remember what it is._

Raiden wiped more blood from his sword, as he looked around the dance floor. "Preacher?" he called out. "Preacher, come out here!"

A voice called out from the stairs leading up to the DJ booth, deep and brassy. "That... ain't the voice I was expectin' to hear today." A man lumbered down the stairs, awkward as though he wasn't fully used to the way legs worked. He was a black man, slightly older than the crowd of men Raiden had just gotten done with, with his hands in his pocket and his face mostly obscured by the hood of his purple sweater. "So, what do you want? I take it you ain't here sight-seein' in that getup."


	4. Chapter 4

**Chapter Four**

 _Punch-drunk Preacherman_

Raiden reached up to remove his dumb shades, keeping a trained eye on the man who just stepped down the last step to the dance floor. "Jerry Preacher?" he asked, "fiftieth ranked assassin of the United Assassin's Association?"

"You got it." Jerry lifted his head just a little bit; Raiden could swear he saw a faint glimmer of something metallic catch the light from under the man's hood for just a second. "And who are you? Sorry, but I was expecting someone else."

"Someone else?" Raiden placed the glasses on the bar and reached for a towel, which thankfully had been spared the rain of viscera from Nick and Dick. As the cyborg moved to wipe the zinc from his nose, he decided to take an educated guess on something. "Touchdown?"

"Don't play dumb." There was venom in the man's voice. Hatred. The kind of thing that probably would have been perfectly reasonable coming from a professional killer, but which nonetheless made Raiden pay just a little bit more attention. "I should've figured he'd send someone out to do his dirty work. What's wrong, his brother or his ninja girlfriend too busy for me?"

"Hate to break it to you..." Raiden put on a show of being casual, even as his eyes worked to get a complete view of the field and of the assassin's stance. "...but nobody sent me."

"Right, sure. So, what? Does that make you number fifty-two, then?"

"I'm not with the UAA, either. Call me a... free agent." Raiden pointed his sword in Jerry's direction with patently unecessary theatrics. "Your organization has something they shouldn't. Something I intend to get back."

"And what would that be?" Jerry asked, with a tone that suggested he really didn't give a shit.

"Don't play dumb!" Now it was Raiden's turn to adopt a bit of angry gravel in his voice. "Tell me what the UAA is planning on doing with the program!"

Jerry began to laugh. It was a cold, but hearty laugh. He pulled a steel fist out of his pocket and pulled back his hood, revealing a face half covered in chrome and circuitry. "You wanna know what the Association's doing? Shit like this; that's what they're doing."

Raiden grunted. "CNT muscle fiber... you're a cyborg?"

"Nah," Jerry replied. "Not like you are, anyways. This is just prosthesis. Got 'em over... I think the doctor said like forty percent of my body." He pulled the other hand out of his pocket, also robotic, and folded his arms over his head in clearly manufactured casualness. "Didn't bother askin' why they had this kind of hardware floatin' around their office. I just heard they'd be willin' to give it to me, for a price."

"And why would you sign up with assassins for some prosthetics?" Raiden asked.

"For a chance at the bastard that cut up my shit in the first place."

Raiden decided to take another stab in the dark. "Touchdown."

Jerry dropped his arms, reached for the small of his back, and produced a sub-machine gun, which he pointed in the cyborg's direction. "Let's get something straight here, Uncle Robo. I'm only here for that guy. If I gotta kill some punk-ass intruding 'free agent' to get my shot with that psycho, then that's what I'm gonna do."

Raiden rolled the kinks out of his shoulder, even though CNT fiber doesn't kink, per se, and it was really more of an unecessary reflex. "Then it seems we're agreed. I want your bosses, so it looks like I've gotta go through you."

Jerry spread himself to a stance more conducive to combat, pulling a little remote from his pocket with his free hand and pointing it towards the DJ booth. There was a mechanical _thunk_ as a face mask sprouted from both sides of Raiden's face, slamming together to cover him forehead to upper lip in an opaque shield. They both stood, taking each other's measure.

And then the music started.

Raiden immediately jumped left, at the same instant Jerry pulled the trigger. He swung his katana in circles around his body, feeling the vibrations as bullets pinged off the blade and went flying in chaotic ricochets around him. He ran around the outside edge of the dance floor, waiting for the tell-tale click of a gun out of bullets, before he cut across and ran towards the assassin. He got about halfway before he saw something flying in from the corner of his eye. Somebody hidden away had tossed Jerry an identical second gun. Raiden just barely managed to get his sword swinging around again fast enough to block the next hail of bullets that came immediately once Jerry had caught it.

Forced back for a moment, Raiden decided to spend the next breather period between the assassin running out of bullets and yet another identical sub-machine gun getting himself back to the bar. He vaulted over, and proceeded to grab bottles and chuck them. He managed to get three or so out before bullets started flying again. As he would have expected from a cyborg, Jerry wasn't terribly impressed by a bunch of awkward lobbed projectiles and dodged them without incident. Raiden didn't much care, as he reached into his little storage area for something. He just wanted the assassin to be expecting something thrown and easily dodged.

Sure enough, when the cyborg got back up and started lobbing things again, Jerry didn't pay it much mind. He took one step to the side, let the projectile sail harmlessly past, and snatched the gun out from out of the air. It was while all this was happening, though, that he recognized that the thing he dodged wasn't a bottle, but instead some round metallic ball. A ball that looked kind of like a grenade. And as he realized his mistake, the grenade went off. He half expected to be blown to bits, but instead he suddenly felt like his arms, parts of his face... actually, about forty percent of his body... all suddenly felt like it weighed a million pounds, forcing him nearly to his knees. When Jerry managed to finally get control of his body back, feeling his cybernetics lumber back to life, he turned and saw that his opponent had decided to cut the counter that his machine gun toting partner had been hiding behind in half. Oh, and he also cut his partner in half, along with it.

Jerry didn't even bother to grab the gun on the floor, knowing that by the time he'd be halfaway to trying, the cyborg would be on him. Instead, he decided to put his new military hardware to good use. He swung, sending a glorious shower of sparks flying off of the blade Raiden threw up in defense. He swung again, watching Raiden buckle slightly under the force of his blows, but knowing that he wasn't going to get anywhere just hitting the flat of a sword. So, on the follow-through, Jerry decided to just reach out, grab the flinching cyborg by the collar of his Hawaiian shirt, and toss him right into the closest wall.

Raiden busted through the cheap, not-up-to-code mortar with hardly any resistance. He found himself in the little dead space underneath the DJ's booth. He considered his options. Staying in here was a poor move, tactically speaking. It was dark, it was cramped, it smelled like cheap mortar and sheetrock dust. Still, if he could lure Jerry in here... wait, where was Jerry going? And that was when Raiden noticed Jerry had the dropped gun in his hand; he cursed his inattention as bullets bounced off his body with stinging force.

The message recieved, Raiden was back out onto the dance floor proper. He charged, his sword clashing against Jerry's raised forearm with a solid clanking of metal. He pulled back and swung again, and then again, each time being swatted aside by a powerful backhand. Jerry managed to get a swing in, himself, which Raiden managed to block.

Raiden saw the hand coming, this time. He hopped to one side, letting the grab go sailing past, and by pure reflex also managed to get a slash in, as well, which Jerry wasn't quite in a position to block. Jerry was sent reeling; the next punch he sent was so easy to see, Raiden managed to completely break his stance with a particularly hard parry. And then, all it took was one kick to the solar plexus, boosted a bit by the little jet propulsion units in his legs, for Jerry to take a turn tumbling into the dead space under the DJ booth.

And it was at that point that that split second Raiden spent trying to strategize bore fruit.

He jumped up, very high up, nearly to the window of the DJ booth, and he began to cut. Somewhere, there had to be studs that held the booth up, and if they were as poorly constructed as the rest of this building's structures... fortunately for him, he didn't really need to seek the wooden beams out; being a man who could cut multiple times a second meant he could just hack and hack until the thing fell down. And fall down it did, dropping wood, mortar, and number one jams directly on top of the assassin, who had been in the process of trying to escape, before the sheer weight of shoddy building pinned him to the floor.

Raiden landed in front of his trapped opponent, pointing his sword in the man's face in an effort to discourage him from moving. "I won't ask again," Raiden said, his voice harsh and cold. "Where are your bosses? Why are they trying to revive the Sons of the Patriots program?"

Jerry coughed, spitting out sheetrock as he tried to keep his lungs from being squeezed too hard. "Fool," he chuckled. "You think they tell _me_ shit? All they said was to sit around this club and wait for the number fifty-one to come in. I don't know any more about the UAA than you do."

"What?" Raiden pushed his sword a milimeter closer. "You have to know _something!_ Who gives you the orders? Who...?"

A sound caught Raiden's attention, something of an electric hum. Instinctively, he hopped to the side and rolled, just in time to see some man in jeans and a jacket come vaulting over where he had been standing, glowing blue sword raised, and plunge it directly into the back of the pinned assassin. Jerry stared up at the man, his eyes wide with surprise, pain, and anger. "Y...you!"

Unfortunately for him, the last noise he made was a spray of blood as his killer swiped upwards.

With that out of the way, Travis Touchdown turned to Raiden. "So... you're the one who decided to steal my fight."


	5. Chapter 5

**Chapter Five**

 _NMR (Platinum Mix)_

"I should have figured this would happen eventually."

Raiden and Travis began to circle each other, the latter tracing lazy shapes in the air with the glow of his beam katana as he continued to speak with manufactured wistfulness. "You know," he began, "these last fifty ranked battles have been some of the best I've had. Every one of them unique, every one of them exciting. I defused an atom bomb with one stroke of my sword. I had a fivesome with Scandanavian swimsuit models. I had to cook ramen for the Prime Minister of Australia under penalty of rocket powered death."

Raiden's expression remained stony, as he waited for the inevitable ambush. "Sounds like a blast," he replied.

"Oh, it was." Travis looked slightly to the right of where Raiden was circling, in the direction of the camera. "I can't help but feel a little bit sorry for all the readers out there who are going to have to miss out, since this fanfic starts _in medias res._ "

"Wait. Readers? Fanfic?"

Travis ignored Raiden's raised eyebrow and continued on. "And after fifty of the things, I had gotten all but convinced they weren't going to do it again. They wouldn't be so predictable to start pulling the anticlimax, 'let's let Travis _think_ there's a cool boss fight coming, but have that boss be killed off at the last second by some random new character who's going to be a pain in his ass for the rest of the game' thing for a third time in a row."

Raiden could see the exit door pass Travis's shoulder. A hundred and eighty more degrees... "Listen," the cyborg said, "I'm not a hundred percent sure what you're talking about here..."

Travis stopped and pointed his katana at the cyborg. "You're not going to turn out to be my long-lost brother, too, are you?"

"What?"

"Never mind. It was stupid the first time."

Raiden had to stare, despite himself, before he managed to regain his composure. "You're Touchdown, right? I'm just looking for answers..." He managed to get the words "so whatever" out in the time it took for Travis to cross the distance of the dance floor and take a swipe, forcing Raiden to stop reasoning for just long enough to jump and roll to the side. "Dammit, listen to me!" Raiden shouted.

"No can do." Travis went back to swinging his sword randomly in the air and pacing, as though his little burst of energy didn't happen. "See, I don't know how it works in your neck of the woods, but I've never had a lot of patience for long, boring talk. You let that take over, and all of a sudden you've got people holding up the action to have long, repetitive talks on the phone or random scenes of... I dunno, little girls cooking eggs."

While all this was going on, the feed from Raiden's AR display was finally starting to pull up information. Or, more accurately, a lack thereof. He wasn't finding any evidence of cyber-augmentation, and there weren't any hits on the XIFF telling him who this man was supposed to be; either somebody in the black market had finally managed to figure out how to get the resources and infrastructure to mimic SOP, or... "Listen," Raiden surpressed the urge to curse his luck. Of all the times to run into an unaugmented civilian... "This is your only warning. Drop your weapon and vacate the premesis or I will be for..."

He saw the angry assassin's muscles tense, in just the way he was worried they were going to tense, and hopped once again to the right before he could be introduced to the glowing blue sword that came flying his way. Another swing came at him, diagonally up and to the right. Acting on brute instinct, Raiden threw his sword up for a parry, realizing about a quarter of the way into the motion the danger invited. Thinking at a pace normally reserved for people with enhanced cybernetic reflexes, he tried his best to begin a spin, feeling the heat from the blade as it scraped against his back with the sound of a hollow electric impact.

Raiden fell low, tucked, and rolled, coming up to one knee and holding up his sword. Or at least, half of his sword. He stared dumbly at the broken blade, the end still glowing red hot from where the beam katana cut a diagonal chunk from it. And then he felt the assassin coming in close, again.

Raiden fell to the side, rolling onto his shoulders, and as Touchdown ran past, he flexed his cybernetic muscles with perfect coordination, wheeling around on his shoulderblades and sending a foot hooking into the back of his opponent's knee. While Travis flew off his feet and onto his back, Raiden stood on one hand and tossed his broken katana up, letting it snap into one of his heel arches, and brought it down like an ax.

And that was when his sword was cut into _three_ pieces, falling out of his arch completely useless.

Thinking quickly, Raiden performed a handspring back onto his feet, just in time to see Travis surging up off the ground, his beam katana cutting erratic figures in the air. The cyborg shifted his body left, right, left, right, each time coming within scant millimeters from hot, lasery death. He arched his back, almost impossibly far, pulling his head back with it. He could feel the sparks fly as the beam katana just barely kissed the edge of his chrome chin.

He came back up, as Travis followed through and ran past. He reached into his improbably spacious tactical pouch, grabbing something that seemed to grab him back. He whipped it out and forward, where it snaked out as a long, heavy black cord of something. Travis grunted as it snapped around his chest and upper arms, staring down for a second to try and make sense of it. It seemed to be a series of robotic arms, alternately holding hands or joined at the shoulder socket. At the end was a knife, whose owner's hand held it dutifully to the assassin's throat.

Raiden yanked, tossing the assassin around and up into the air. The arms released their hold on Travis, unwinding him so that he spun in the air like a top. "Bull's-eye!" Raiden felt the world slow down, as he set his electrolytes to overclock his system. He was a blur of motion, swinging the mass of arms around like a double-ended pole arm, the arms bending and wrapping around his body, whenever they weren't busy cutting whistling arcs straight for the assassin.

And that was when Raiden's weapon broke into more pieces than he really cared to count, at the time.

Even so, Travis fell to the ground, cut and smacked around, his beam katana only putting up a modest defense of his vitals. Raiden stared at L'etranger, at this point little more than the two arms joined in the center, and at the pieces of arms and hands languishing on the floor in simulated pain. He tossed it aside, reaching into his tactical pouch for something else to use. "Had enough?" he shouted.

Travis laughed, a harsh, barking noise, as he pulled himself to his feet. "You kidding?" he taunted. "I've fought old ladies, who hit harder than you."

Raiden's face screwed up, in mingled frustration and anger. He tossed something out, a crackling blue line of energy stretching from his hand, to an ornate metal sai. The weapon hooked into Travis's jacket, creating a link between the two fighters. A link that was quickly severed when Raiden came flying in, rockets blasting, with a dropkick to the chest.

Or, at least, that's how it usually goes. What he wasn't expecting was for Travis to see the kick coming, and to skirt to the side at the last possible moment.

The world seemed to slow down, as Travis pretty much did what came naturally to him. He slashed like a madman, filling the air with a cacophony of electric hums and crashes, watching the sparks of blue lightning fly from the cyborg with every swing as the assassin ran after Raiden. With his opponent reeling, he brought himself down low, tensed his muscles, and swung up with all his might.

His sword caught itself in one of the prongs of Raiden's sai. Or at least, in the area of crackling plasma that _surrounded_ Raiden's sai. Raiden grit his teeth, mechanical structures in his body whining in protest as he forced the beam katana away from his already charred body. The two of them paused, for just a moment, to stare at their locked weapons, the both of them realizing in unison that _this_ weapon didn't seem like it was in any danger of being cut into pieces by Travis's sword.

Raiden couldn't help a grin of boyish triumph.

Suddenly, the fight was cut short by the sound of a coach's whistle. The two turned their heads away from the fight and at the entrance to the dance floor, where a young, blonde woman stood, with said whistle in one laboriously manicured hand and the other coquetteishly resting on her hip.

"Zat ees enough," she said, with the sort of potent French accent that the author finds a bit hard to transcribe, sometimes, to the point where he's tempted to not bother. "The fight is over. Travis, you are now Rank Fifty."

"Oh, come _on,_ Sylvia!" Travis shouted, driving his point home with an added push against Raiden's sai. "Is this just gonna be the running gag? You _know_ the gamers get pissed whenever we steal boss fights from them!"

"What the hell are you talking about?" Raiden gruffed, returning the push and adding one of his own.

The woman named Sylvia put her whistle in a handbag that probably cost about as much as Raiden's cybernetic implants from the chest up, combined. She huffed. "Oh, quit taking it like a bitch," she said, with a tone that was just a little too "French maid in a skeezy eighties porno" to be in any way congruous with her words. "You should know the rules, by now. This is not the first sequel, after all."

"Sequel?" Raiden looked from one crazy talking person to the next, bemused. "Sequel to what?"

Travis snarled, shoving himself out of their deadlock with an air that just screamed "Fine!" He paced for a few seconds, muttering dark little oaths to himself about how characters in obscure, ultraviolent OVAs never had to take any of this kind of shit, before pointing his beam katana at Raiden. "This isn't over, old man," he promised. "If I find out you're taking over my spot as the main character, you're going down." He turned and started storming out, exhaling through his nose. Raiden caught him muttering "...unbeleivable..." as he left.

"Wait!" Raiden called. "What's going on? Main character for what?" He thought for a second, blinked, and snarled at the doorway. "And who are you calling 'old man?!'"

"Well, now," Sylvia let the assassin blow past him and started to cross the dance floor. "That just leaves the question of what to do with you, then."

"What does that mean?" Raiden asked. "Are you with the UAA?"

Sylvia didn't seem to hear him, or care, overly much. "You seem to be pretty skilled, Mister..."

"Uh, Raiden." The cyborg leaned back a bit, when the little French girl started getting a bit too close.

"I see..." Sylvia stared Raiden up and down, with the sort of casual, disapproving air one would normally give of a man dressed like somebody's dumpy, unfuckable uncle. "Perhaps you should try your hand at aiming for the top, like your new friend, Travis." She turned from him, reaching into her bag for a lipstick in a shade of pink that was almost impossibly bright. "There is always room for one more assassin in the game, you know."

Raiden shook his head. "Sorry. Not interested. I'm here for SOP, not whatever blood sport you've got going on."

Sylvia put her lipstick away, still not really affected as she dug around for something else. "Suit yourself. But, you should know, since you've defeated the fiftieth ranked assassin, that means you are now part of the system."

"The system?" Raiden was about to ask her to explain, when a bright flash caused him to flinch.

Sylvia had a camera in her hands, which she lowered just enough to give the cyborg a half-lidded smirk. "We'll be considering you number fifty-one, in Travis's place. It is a dangerous title to have; those below you will be constantly after your place in the rankings. You'll need to be on your guard at all times."

No hits on the XIFF. Raiden finally let his face plate open up and settle on either side of his face. She was another unaugmented civilian. "So, what," he asked, "is that supposed to be a threat?" He flinched, when the camera flashed a second time.

"Not a threat. Just business." Sylvia started to walk away, making a clearly purposeful attempt to stick as much seduction into her walk as she could. "If you want to know about SOP, perhaps you will find your answers further up the ranks. I'm sure you can find us, again, if you change your mind."

Raiden thought about going after her, but something told him he wasn't going to get much more information out of her, anyway. Besides, when he looked down at himself, seeing the charred muscle fiber and pockmarks from errant bullets, he realized that it might very well have been time for a tactical retreat.

As he moved to recover his equipment, and see if he couldn't find some nanopaste stored away in Jerry Preacher's prosthetics, the two remaining robotic arms that comprised Raiden's former pole-arm began the slow, mournful process of gathering up its other pieces, scooping up bits of arms and fingers and pulling them in, like a mother comforting its hurting child.


	6. Chapter 6

**Chapter Six**

 _I dunno... generic overworld theme. Fuck you._

There was something about the rumble of the Schpeltiger that had a nice, soothing effect on Travis. Particularly when he jacknifed the thing around a corner and heard the sound of someone _just_ managing to avoid being the victim of a hit and run. One of these days, the cops were going to give him a ticket, and he would actually honor that ticket. Neither of those things were going to happen today, however. Cops were practically an urban legend in Santa Destroy.

He caught a glimpse of the gym, as he blew past it at top speed. _Looks like it's finally gonna open up, again,_ he thought to himself. Ever since he learned that Ryan, the previous owner, just so happened to be number... was it eighty five, or eighty four? The battles kind of started to run together, after the first fifteen. Anyway, ever since Ryan turned out to be part of the UAA, it had kind of been awkward trying to get mileage out of his membership. The poor leotard wearing bastard seemed to know that all that personal training was going to kill him, eventually. That being said, it was highly professional of the guy to do it, anyway. He even took a more hands-on approach, using some new techniques he invented. Travis had no idea there was so much power locked away in his glutes! He _still_ tingled a bit, when he thought about it!

He thought about immediately swinging home, popping in his advance import copy of _Bizarre Jelly: Fantastic Sparkle no Frendship Adventure,_ when he spotted the temp agency off in the distance. In the two or so seconds before it threatened to pass, he decided to pull a bootleg turn, squealing to a stop right in front of the door with only a mailbox and park bench suffering the wrath of his forced stop. Oh, no, wait. Someone's grandpa got it, too, but he was quiet about it. No matter. Travis didn't care about that; it was time to get _paid!_

"Yo, pops!" Travis said, almost before he'd managed to punt the door open. "I'm back. Job me!"

"Eh, what?" A goatee attached to a vaguely man-shaped mass of leather and muscle fiber glared at him from behind the desk. "You, again? I thought you'd be dead, by now."

"That's crazy," Travis replied. "I've been doing this for a while, now. I can handle your little goon squads."

"No, not them," Pops spat back, with a paradoxically belligerent smirk. "I meant actually having to work for a living. We still haven't managed to beat the slacker outta you."

Travis shook his head. "Well, then, I'm happy to disappoint. Now, have you got a job for me, or not?"

"Well, lessee..." Pops pulled up a set of papers, ignoring the stains starting to form from his eternally sweaty, callused hands. "Got a contract going for a new branch of Burger Suplex."

"What're they doing this time?" Travis asked. "Taco Suplex? Maybe Chinese Suplex?"

"Actually, they've gotten into the laundry business. After Pizza Bat went under, the ol' power vacuum resulted in a lot of industries opening up in places you wouldn't expect."

"Yeah, whatever. Listen, Pops, I was kinda hoping you had something a little more exciting lined up."

"And I was kinda hoping my wife would put out for me this month, and not the mailmain, but we can't always get what we want." If Pops seemed to be in a bad mood, he was either expertly masking it, or taking genuine pleasure in taking it out on Travis. "I don't need a strikebreaker, this week. Unlike you, I finally managed to get some folks who wanna actually _work_ for a living." He shoved the by now sweat soaked contract to the front of the desk. "Take it or leave it, kid. Makes no difference to me, if you eat tonight."

Travis picked up the piece of paper with the tips of his index finger and thumb. "Whatever," he sighed. It wasn't as though being an unskilled laborer wasn't paradoxically more profitable in Santa Destroy than being an assassin, but God damn if it didn't get tedious after a while. He burst out the door about as violently as he burst in, ignoring the last little jab Pops had about his sneakers or whatever "young people" thing he took offense to, today.

Outside, he was surprised to see a trench coat hovering over his bike. Well, a trench coat and a hat. It was trying its darndest to look casual, as it circled around the back tire.

"Better be careful," Travis called out, grinning wolfishly as he let his free hand slowly fall back to the beam katana hanging off the back of his belt. "That thing's got a new paint job that's probably worth more than your life."

The trench coat made a high pitched little warble of panic, turning to face Travis with a move that seemed to cause its entire body to wobble and tilt dangerously. And then it ran off, its feet making a strange slapping noise as they hit the ground.

Travis didn't really notice the fact that the trench coat seemed to be running away on a set of barely perceptible black hands, instead just shrugging his shoulders at the missed opportunity for a fight. He climbed back on the Schpeltiger and promptly forgot about it.

In a nearby alleyway, however, the trench coat watched him leave with a nervous shuffle. A single robotic eye flashed to life, in the little opening made in the coat's chest. It looked down in the direction of its crotch, wondering to it if it managed to get the tracking device planted.

A black arm snaked out of the coat's bottom and gave an enthusiastic thumb's up, before slipping back into hiding.

The trench coat's gut began to chirp warily, as if concerned that the scary man might notice what they put on his precious motorcycle.

The chest shook its top hand back and forth, in a way that made it look like the hat it was hidden inside was saying "No." It wasn't like it mattered, it seemed to say. They did what the Boss expected of them, and it wasn't part of their programming to have to think any further than that.

The trench coat's groin began to chirp and whistle excitedly. Apparently, now that the job was done, it really wanted to head down to the shore and go collect coconuts, like the rest of the body promised.

The gut voiced its continued trepidation, being more than happy to remember just how mean the Boss could be, when they went off on their own.

However, the groin was adamant. After all, coconuts were apparently worth more than human life in Santa Destroy. Imagine what they could buy with all those LB Dollars!

The trench coat's chest was hesitant, fancying itself the leader, however it was predictable when it came to matters of money. It eventually relented, naturally phrasing it as though going to the shore had been its idea, the entire time.

The groin whistled in unabashed glee, sending the entire trench coat barreling down the road in a terrifying, wobbling mockery of human locomotion.

"Bladewolf, come in."

No answer. Raiden grit his teeth.

"Bladewolf, respond!"

Still no answer.

 _"Bladewoooooolf!"_

Raiden shut down his Codec with a muttered curse. He should have known that screaming someone's name over radio communication wasn't going to make them hear you, but it was just so easy to forget that, in the moment. He put his finger back to his ear and began to pull up his lists of contacts.

 _Churrip, churrip!_ went the outgoing Codec call chime, followed a moment later by a familiar face appearing on Raiden's AR display.

"Kevin."

"Raiden?" The man on the other side ran a hand through his corn rows and sighed. "It's been a while. I was starting to think you lost this frequency."

"Sorry. Hope I'm not interrupting something important."

"No, not really. A couple of trade negotiations in Singapore are wrapping up, now, so they've got me on standby. What's going on? Where are you?"

"I'm back in the States. Santa Destroy, California. Bladewolf was here, but I lost contact with him."

Kevin huffed. "So, lemme guess. The only reason you called is 'cause you need my help."

"I'm afraid so. He said he was headed towards something called an Akashic Point. Any chance you can find out where that is?"

"Well, hold on a second." Kevin leaned forward, tapping away on the computer to which the Codec's camera was apparently installed, in the absence of the unaugmented human's cybernetics. "Uh... you're gonna have to narrow that down for me. Says here Santa Destroy's got _three_ of them."

"Three of them? What even _are_ they?"

"You know, I think I've heard of these places. They say the ghosts of violent killers congregate there, letting their negative emotions fester until they become demons."

"Ghosts?" said the cyborg soldier, formerly an agent of a league of supersoldiers nanomachined to the hilt. "Don't tell me you beleive that nonsense."

"I dunno. Says here a lot of nasty things have happened, there."

"It's probably something to do with this UAA business," Raiden insisted. "Can you send the information over? I'll try and figure out which one Bladewolf went to by isolating his last known location."

"All right. Sending it, now."

Raiden's Soliton Radar pinged, telling him that new information was available. "All right, got it. I owe you for this, Kev."

Kevin chuckled. "Hey, you can make it up by not flaking on me, again. Seriously, you've got friends here at Maverick. You don't have to be a stranger, just because you're out fighting your little personal fight."

Raiden's jaw set for a second, as he thought that over. "Yeah. You're right. Everyone else still on their old frequencies? I'll drop them a line, when I've got a moment."

"Pshh. You think Boris would shell out for new proprietary frequencies, if he didn't have to? The man's still as stingy as..." The sound of a deep-voiced, very annoyed Russian from off in the distance interrupted Kevin's thought. He mashed down on a button with a panicked. "Whoops. Gotta go!"

Raiden chuckled to himself, as he stepped over a half of a body and emerged from the alleyway. "Sounds like they haven't changed a bit." He stepped into another alley, which led around a building, and a few moments later a cyborg in a Hawaiian shirt was seen barreling down the road on a blue and black classic chopper, in the textbook definition of "subtle."


	7. Chapter 7

**Chapter Seven**

 _Setting Sun_

Trying to find an Akashic point seemed to be a tall order, and not just because the idea was too ridiculous on its face to ever be real. Mostly, the story of where in Santa Destroy you could even _find_ them changed constantly. Apparently, every single place in which somebody ever experienced anything weird or unexplained, or anywhere that happened to be within spitting distance of a business hoping to draw in crowds of brooding teenagers, just so happened to also be an Akashic point. Fortunately, Raiden had professional intel on his side, to weed out the locations that were secretly trying to sell him screamo-branded energy drinks.

And so it was, that Raiden found himself in front of Santa Destroy Junior High. Or, at least, the building that _used_ to be Santa Destroy Junior High, before the Spring Dance Incident rendered it unusable as a center of juvenile education. Raiden pulled himself off of his motorcycle and took the building in. The windows were smashed, the walls were riddled with what appeared to be the pockmarks of indiscriminately fired bullets, there was graffiti in English and... was that Japanese? How unusually cosmopolitan, for street artwork, Raiden found himself thinking.

The front door wasn't locked. Which wasn't to say it was unlocked. Rather, its lock had been rendered useless by what appeared to be an excessive amount of explosives. Raiden stepped past the charred remains of the metal and glass door. No sooner had he crossed the threshold than a sound caused him to jump. He was down in a stance, clawed hands at the ready to start tearing, before he realized it was just the chirp of his Codec going off in his head.

Raiden pressed a finger to his ear. "Raiden," he said.

A series of garbled noises answered him, lost amid electrical static and background noise.

Raiden furrowed his brow. "Who is this? Your signal's weak."

The voice on the other end seemed to be struggling to speak, as though throats were something they were unaccustomed to using. Raiden managed to catch the words "ring" and "AR display," in the mass of strangled choking. He couldn't help but feel like there was something borderline recognizable in that voice.

"Who is this?" Raiden repeated. "Identify yourself. How did you get this frequency?"

Raiden managed to catch that the Codec display in front of him was displaying a null entry for the incoming call's frequency number, before it disconnected and the virtual screen winked out entirely. Gritting his teeth, he tried to pull up the number for Doktor, hoping that the man might be able to help trace that call.

 _Churrip, churrip... churrip, churrip..._ No answer. Raiden tried someone else.

 _Churrip, churrip... churrip, churrip..._ Boris wasn't picking up, either.

A noise beyond his heads up display pulled him away just as he was about to accuse Kevin of lying about the frequencies being the same. It sounded like... giggling? Who was giggling, in a place like this? Raiden's heels clicked against the dirty, cracked tile floor as he followed the source of the insipid laughter. Cautiously, he peered around the door frame and into the classroom, where he was sure he could hear it coming from.

Empty. And the laughter had stopped. Raiden slipped into the room, eyes carefully sweeping left and right and finding nothing other than broken desks, bullet holes, and what appeared to be burns from beam katanas. Whatever happened here, it was like a war had taken place.

Towards the back of the room, desperately out of place for it's apparent newness in the surrounding decay and age, was a lone cardboard box. The letters H-I-D-E-O were printed on one side; Raiden had to make a slow circuit around it to figure out that it actually spelled out a company along all its faces: Hideous Freight, Ltd. What a stupid name for a company, Raiden began to think.

Suddenly, the box giggled. Raiden flinched, claws out. "Who's that?"

The box only responded with more giggles, shaking in mirth and excitement.

Raiden snarled. "I know you're there. Come out slowly, with your hands up."

Suddenly, the box stopped laughing, snapping back into stillness with a violence that kicked up a little plume of dust around itself. Raiden approached the box carefully. He tapped at it with his foot. No response.

Slowly, oh so terribly slowly, he reached down and put his hands around the sides. The box came up without resistance, the bottom falling away as he lifted it over his head. He looked down, at the patch of floor where the box had lain, and there he saw...

...nothing.

Tension hissed out of Raiden's nose, as his eyes widened in disbelief. He knew what he saw. He knew what he had heard. Were his cybernetics failing him? Or was somebody playing a trick? The word "ghost" popped into his head, unbidden, which he immediately quashed. It wasn't as if...

 _Chirrup, chirrup..._

Raiden flinched in the direction of his head's up display, as another Codec call came in. The next thing he swore he noticed was the faintest of shimmers, the softest of sounds of motion. And then, all of a sudden, something was wrapping itself around his midsection, invisible arms clamping down with sudden force.

He barely had time to say "Wha...?" before his thoughts were cut short by a violent explosion.

When he came to, he was dimly aware of the fact that some time must have passed. At least, the lack of sunlight coming in from the windows told him that much. He looked down at his body. Scorch marks covered his entire front, and he could see a couple of exposed, frayed wires. Electrolyte fluid stained the ground. Considering he was the only cyborg he was aware of for miles, it stood to reason that was his fluid.

A sound filtered in from the hallway outside. Giggling. Raiden tried to get up, but he could only get about halfway to sitting before blinding pain took his breath away. Desperately, he swung his head around, trying to find something he could use. Anything.

His eyes fell on the empty box, now charred and crumbled into bits just inside arm's reach. Something metallic glinted just inside. The cyborg reached out and wrapped his hand around it, pulling it out into the light to reveal... a gun. A Mark 23 pistol, to be precise.

 _Chirrup, chirrup..._ His Codec answered the incoming call before he even registered the number. The null entry caller began to gurgle something into his ear almost immediately.

"Who are you?" Raiden shouted, a tad too loudly, in retrospect.

The door to the classroom swung open, seemingly of it's own accord. Raiden could hear the faint sound of slapping, as of bare feet against stone floors. There was the faintest shimmer from the doorway. It began to laugh.

The choking noise from the Codec began to make some noises that Raiden assumed had to be authoritative barking. Again, he could barely make out the words "AR display." Confused, Raiden did what he guessed he was being told, snapping his augmented reality visor over his face.

The shimmer immediately took form, glowing against the blue background that Raiden's visor painted the dark room in. It looked to be a human, or at least a collection of rough slabs of meat in the basic shape of a human. It toddled over to Raiden with a gait like an old man with leg issues, giggling to itself like it was about to play the greatest possible prank. For reasons Raiden couldn't begin to guess, its right elbow seemed to glow with an intensity that the AR display registered as significant.

Without pausing to really think about it, Raiden lifted the gun and took a shot at the glowing elbow. The laughing man stopped dead in its tracks, as if frozen in time, before suddenly bursting into a cloud of glowing, marble-like spheres. The spheres scattered, swarmed in the air, and gathered back together on Raiden's body. The cyborg panicked, thinking he was about to be blown up again, until he realized that they were absorbing into his body.

Silence reigned over the classroom, after that. Raiden could only stare down at his body in confusion. He felt... better. Not repaired, or anything, but at least getting up and moving felt like more of an option. What was that stuff? It seemed to act like nanopaste, the way it worked on his body.

The voice on the Codec gurgled in his ear, some more. Something about smiles and being a soldier.

"Right." Raiden put a finger to his ear as he pulled himself to his feet. "I'm not gonna ask again. Who is this?"

The voice gruffed something. It was a very familiar gruff.

"Wait a minute... Snake? Snake, is that you? I thought you were..."

The Codec call disconnected. Raiden took his finger off his ear and balled his hand into a fist. None of it. He wasn't willing to believe any of what was going on. This was a trick. This was some kind of Psycho Mantis level mind games. He needed to keep his head. He needed to remember what was real, and what was fake.

He stared down at his other hand. The gun he had felt real enough. The wounds from that explosion felt real. Whatever that... thing was, it was hard to pretend there wasn't a threat, here.

"I can do this," he said to himself, as he moved to peek around the doorway into the hall. "Just gotta take this one slow."

His mutters to himself was greeted with giggles coming from further down the hall. Raiden took a deep breath, held his gun in both hands, and stepped out.


End file.
